The City of Tshwane has written off over R4.3 billion of customers’ debt through its incentive and debt-relief scheme which was introduced earlier this year. The City spokesperson Lindela Mashigo told YOU FM Newshour listeners that the initiative is part of the city’s commitment to provide financial relief to hard-pressed residents, businesses, deceased’s estates, indigent and child-headed households.
“Of the R4.3 billion, R2.4 billion was written off from more than 85 000 indigent accounts. These are indigent customers and child-headed households which received a 100% debt write-off. However, these customers are still responsible for the payment of any consumption exceeding the allocated subsidy of 100kWh of
electricity and 12kl of water,” said Mashigo.
Mashigo said the customers were selected after a thorough process, which specifically focused on different target groups. “We were told wherever we went that there are child headed homes in this community, and as the municipality we couldn’t continue to demand that they pay for municipal services. We found indigent households that depends solely on old pension grants of grandparents and of course we also found that there were several of our residents who tempered with our electricity meter boxes, etc,” explained Mashigo.
Furthermore, Mashigo said that several residential and business customers also benefited from the R4.3 billion write off after the city cancelled R66.4 million from the 984 applications it received for incentive and debt relief. The applicants owed the city a total amount of R147.4 million.
Mashigo said that the more than R1.8 billion was written off from more than 31 000 inactive accounts, which had no service installation linked to them and were found to be dormant.
“If you no longer pay, we are not able to record a consumption as the municipality and the account becomes dormant. Because the likelihood is that “o notile” you have illegally bridged or tempered with our electricity meter box, and we’re unable to gauge how much you are consuming, nothing is being registered in our
system to indicated that you are active. Many of them came forward to declare,” Mashigo added.
The city said that it has captured more than 17 000 of the applications with 10 741 of them handed over to the city’s electricity department for normalisation. Meanwhile, Mashigo highlighted that their rigorous revenue collection campaigns like Tshwane Ya Tima continue to yield positive results.
“We have Tshwane ya Tima, which targets non-payers, individuals, businesses, government departments and embassies that are not fulfilling their obligations to pay for municipal services. So, we target those but as a caring government we have been holding interactions that we label Imbizos interfacing with the public, different stakeholders in a form of churches, individuals, business and what we discovered is that our people are struggling to make ends meet let alone to pay municipal services,” Mashigo explained
The city said that it managed during this period to collect over R81 million as of 30 May 2025.
